It was David Hume’s 1758 Of the First Principles of Government that stated:

Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.

When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that, as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and most popular.

—David Hume, Of the First Principles of Government

Hume was not alone in associating military governments with despotic governments. When any person puts himself both above and against the law, then the people are entitled lawfully to rise up —violently if necessary —to overthrow the tyrant, the self-proclaimed dictator. In our own Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson said that “…whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it”. Che Guevara spoke of such ‘governments’ when he said:

When the forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law, peace is considered already broken

Che Guevara, Chapter I: General Principles of Guerrilla Warfare

John Dean makes this chilling point. Nixon, at the height of the Watergate scandal, toyed with the idea of defying the high court, but, in the end thought better of it and resigned. Bush/Cheney won’t budge amid declarations that whatever may be alleged against them, they can, themselves “authorize” it and make it legal –even after the fact. This is, of course, utter bullshit, a violation of the Constitutional prohibition of ex post facto laws1. But powerful men with nukes and paid thugs believe it.

Sinclair Lewis wrote a now famous book entitled: It Can’t Happen Here! But, in fact, it has and in a manner that closely resembles the fictional rise to power of one “Buzz” Windrip. We should not be surprised. George W. Bush’s grandfather had, in fact, plotted with fellow Nazis to overthrow the government of FDR and establish, in America, a fascist dictatorship. Too late now I’m afraid, have we learned the lessons of history, how almost all dictatorships begin and grow.

1. The Police State Almost Always Follows a False-Flag Terrorist Attack

2. A Climate of Fear is Maintained.

3. The state forces upon its citizens an ‘existential’ choice: “You are either for me or for the terrorists!”.

4. Public Opinion Becomes Irrelevant

5. The government places itself above the law

6. The Government Denies ‘Due Process of Law’

7. Atrocities are justified with lies, myths or propaganda

8. Dissent is crushed with arbitrary power

9. War is begun upon a pack of lies

10. The ‘state’ becomes ‘absolute’ and absurdly self-justifying’

Over the next several posts, I propose to take each point in turn. Story tellers since Aristotle have told us that every story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Bush’s story is the story of how he and the GOP leadership conspired to create a police state of America.

The Police State Always Follows a False-Flag Terrorist Attack

Hitler never got more than 37 percent of the vote in several elections called over a short period of time ending with an act of terrorism that Hitler would exploit to consolidate his dictatorship. That act was the Reichstag Fire, Hitler’s 911.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone would dare go back to the well given the press “Reichstag” gets. Nevertheless, the tactic, having proved successful for Nazis, would be tried again. No one ever accused Bush of being imaginative. His gang would simply repeat a tired, old Nazi tactic and expect the people to go along. And, for the most part, the people did precisely that.

On February 27, 1937, Hitler was having dinner with Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels when the phone rang to inform the future Fuhrer: “The Reichstag is on fire!” At the scene, Hitler and Goebbels, found Hermann Goring, later Hitler’s air minister, shouting “at the top of his lungs”, blaming communists for an act of terrorism.

From Goring’s Reichstag President’s Palace an underground passage, built to carry the central heating system, ran to the Reichstag building. Through this tunnel Karl Ernst, a former hotel bellhop who had become the Berlin S.A. leader, led a small detachment of storm troopers on the night of February 27 to the Reichstag, where they quickly scattered gasoline and self-igniting chemicals and then made their way quickly back to the palace the way they had come. At the same time a half-witted Dutch Communist with a passion for arson, Marinus van der Lubbe, had made his way into the huge, darkened and to him unfamiliar building and set some small fires of his own. This feeble-minded pyromaniac was a godsend to the Nazis. He had been picked up by the S.A. a few days before after having been overheard in a bar boasting that he had attempted to set fire to several public buildings and that he was going to try the Reichstag next.

The coincidence that the Nazis had found a demented Communist arsonist who was out to do exactly what they themselves had determined to do seems incredible but is nevertheless supported by the evidence. The idea for the fire almost certainly originated at the top with Goebbels and Goring. Hans Gisevius, an official in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior at the time, testified at Nuremberg that ‘it was Goebbels who first thought of setting the Reichstag on fire’ and Rudolph Diels, the Gestapo chief, added in an affidavit that ‘Goring knew exactly how the fire was to be started’ and had ordered him ‘to prepare, prior to the fire, a list of people who were to be arrested immediately after it.’ General Franz Halder, Chief of the German General Staff during the early part of World War II, recalled at Nuremberg how on one occasion Goring had boasted of his deed.

At a luncheon on the birthday of the Fuehrer in 1942 the conversation turned to the topic of the Reichstag building and its artistic value. I heard with my own ears when Goring interrupted the conversation and shouted: “The only one who really knows about the Reichstag is I, because I set it on fire!” With that he slapped his thigh with the flat of his hand.

Hitler ordered a round up of the usual suspects, in other words, his opposition, consisting largely of communists whom the Nazis could, with but a shred of credibility, blame for an act of bloody terrorism.

Nazis knew what goppers know now –that frightened and anxious people will willingly surrender the blessings of liberty. From Hitler’s experience, Bush learned how to use a “Patriot Act” to crack down on dissent.

Hitler wasted no time. The very next day, he was in President Hindenburg’s office urging the aging statesman to issue a patriot act, a decree entitled, “For the Protection of the People and the State.” Justified as a “defensive measure against Communist acts of violence endangering the state,” the decree suspended constitutional guarantees of civil liberties.

Upon 911 and claims that he is waging a great “war on terror” in Iraq, Bush cites a principle unheard of since King Charles I dared to place himself above Parliament. Called a ‘unitary executive’, it is, in fact, an American police state. Briefly, a terrorist is whomever Bush says is a terrorist. Anyone –political opposition, dissidents, advocates of free speech, peaceful demonstrators –is a terrorist if Bush ‘deems’ them so. You can be arrested and detained indefinitely. You don’t get a phone call. You don’t get a lawyer. You don’t get a trial.

Bush claims powers that had accrued to Hitler in 1933. His Federalist Society apologists and Department of Justice appointees claim that President Bush has the same power to interpret the Constitution as the Supreme Court. An Alito Court is likely to agree with this false claim. This is the great issue that is before the country.

Most often, Bush assumes a power and exercises it. He dares anyone to stop him. Congress is spooked.

In other cases, he calls upon a legion of toadies who will confirm his version of reality. They will tell him that the illegal is legal and that, if he does it, it’s legal even though he is sworn to uphold the laws that apply to everyone else. These toadies include former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and California law professor John Yoo. Both men support torture, domestic wiretapping and surveillance; both men have tortured logic itself to come up with their idiotic, cockamamie schemes.

Both men are practitioners of Nixon logic: it’s not illegal if the President does it! Both men work backward from desired conclusions to premises however false! Both men, like Merlin, work backward from Bush’s hellish future, cooking up evil schemes in the present to make it all come true and ‘legal’ when it does. Both men remind one of the Nazi bureaucrats who convened at Wannsee in order to make legal the campaign of genocide that Hitler had already begun.

Bush has arrogated unto himself the power to interpret the laws, powers never assigned him in the Constitution, powers that have been reserved to the High Court since Marbury v Madison. If Bush is correct, then over 200 years of American history and at least some 400 years of English common law is wrong. Bush alone is right. Quite an achievement for a moron challenged to put a noun and verb together meaningfully. For Bush the law means nothing if it does not mean his power to issue decrees.

The Supreme Court and the Congress might as well pack it up an go home. Bush is the all powerful poohbah, the absolute dictator of the world. Now –if you believe that, go bow down to Bush. If you do not believe that, then you have no choice but to resist Bush by refusing to recognize the legality of his decrees, the ‘legitimacy’ of his stolen regime, the legality of his overt attempts to subvert the Constitution, the independent judiciary, the Congress. It is time to take up the gauntlet and throw down one of our own with a strong message to Bush attached:

• your ‘Presidency’ is illegitimate

• 911 was an inside job

• War against Iraq violated international laws and our own Constitution; it is a war crime, an act of mass murder begun upon a pack of deliberate, treasonous lies

• no decree or ‘signing statement’ issued by your office is legal

• you are in violation of US Codes which you tried to ‘change’ only ex post facto after you had already committed the crime.

• At last, there is probable cause right now to try you for capital crimes under the US Codes that you tried –unlawfully –to change but only after you had already perpetrated the crime of mass murder in a war of naked aggression!

False-Flag Terrorist Attack

FBI Director Robert Mueller admitted that the FBI had no evidence to link the 19 ‘Muslim men’ who have apparently disappeared –neither on the autopsy list or the original ‘official flight manifests’ –to the events of 911. In speech to the Common Wealth Club in San Francisco on April 19, 2003, Mueller stated that the purported hijackers ‘left no paper trial’. “In our investigation”, he said: “we have not uncovered a single piece of paper – either here in the United States or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere – that mentioned any aspect of the Sept. 11 plot.” Indeed, there are no ‘Arab names’, no names of ‘hijackers’ on the official pathologist’s report. Several news organizations, most prominently the BBC, reported several of the 19 still alive and interviewed them. The Washington Post said that Hani Hanjour, the alleged ‘pilot’ of Flight 77. was still alive. Briefly, the official 911 theory is utter crap.

Certainly, Bushco opposed the creation of the 911 Commission, having already ordered the destruction of evidence at the Pentagon and ‘ground zero’. Since, Bush interfered with the work of the 911 Commission.

These are not the actions of an innocent man. Had Bush wanted the truth out, he would have supported a complete, fair, and impartial investigation. He would not have ordered the destruction of forensic evidence. He would not have shipped WTC steel to China and elsewhere. If Bush wanted the truth out, he could have released hundreds of photos taken of whatever it was that crashed the Pentagon. But he did not! We must, therefore, conclude that he did not want a complete, fair, and impartial investigation. He did not want you to know what really crashed into the Pentagon. He did not want experts to examine WTC wreckage. Therefore, if Bush did not want a complete, fair, and impartial investigation, then there is every valid reason to suspect that it is his own guilt and complicity that he actively seeks to hide.

A single body might have gone along way in supporting Bush. The identified and autopsied body of Hani Hanjour, for example, might have supported the Bush/Cheney theory that Hani piloted an aircraft that he most certainly could never have piloted. Some physical evidence might have overcome serious objections, but –alas –there are no bodies! There are no hijacker names on the pathologists report. There is no evidence that Hanjour’s remains were buried. There is no evidence that Hani Hanjour was ever on any of the Flights in Question! The Washington Post even reported that Hanjour was not on Flight 77 because he did not have a ticket. It’s hard to imagine Hanjour forcing his way on board and, after having done so, taking control in the cockpit and taking off! I just don’t think that ever happened. Wasn’t it Bush who warned us not to tolerate wild or outlandish conspiracy theories? Bush’s ‘official theory’ is not only wild and outlandish, it is shot through with holes and inconsistencies. It’s baloney!

It’s not enough that the Bush administration actively covered up evidence even as it sought to quash every attempt to investigate 911, Bush and Condoleeza Rice would lie about the event after the fact, specifically, both Bush and Condo stated that the crashing of airliners into buildings could not have been foreseen. [Bush: No evidence that US could avoid 9/11] Bush lied! And so did Condo Rice:

Today’s Sydney Morning Herald prints an extract from Shenon’s book which provides further details about Rice’s incompetence. “Emails from the National Security Council’s counter-terrorism director, Richard Clarke, showed that he had bombarded Rice with messages about terrorist threats” before 9/11, Shenon writes.

In fact, just such a ‘scenario’ was the basis for security when Bush attended the G8 Summit in Italy, July 23, 2001 [See: "Italy: Bush Targeted at G8." New York Newsday 19 Sept 2001, unsigned; "Extremists 'Planned Genoa Attack on Bush'", BBC News, 27 Sept 2001]. Secondly, Dick Cheney supervised precisely that scenario on the very day that it happened in fact –a highly improbable coincidence’ that would repeat later in Britain on 7/7. Cheney supervised what are called ‘exercises’ within a bunker –the Presidential Emergency Operations Center –located under the White House. There is damning testimony against Cheney from former Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta who contradicts 9/11 Commission Report’s Account of Dick Cheney’s timetable.

Condoleezza Rice, “9/11: For The Record,” Washington Times, March 22, 2004: “Despite what some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles, though some analysts speculated that terrorists might hijack airplanes to try to free US-held terrorists.” Also see “Promoting Icon Condi” in the August 4, 2003, Daily Howler.

Rice’s statements were bald faced lies. Only the guilty try to cover up their crimes.

If the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated or at least deliberately allowed by the Bush- Cheney administration and the Pentagon, then the motivation to cover up this murderous and treasonous act would be unlimited. No expenditure of time and money would be considered too great.”

The Bush administration and accomplices in other government offices would have you believe an absurd coincidence theory that on the very day, the very moment that Dick Cheney was supervising an exercise in which terrorists would attack the Pentagon and WTC, a rag tag gang of ‘terrorists’ would do precisely that!

Our ‘government’ thus declared war on the people of the United States and wages it! As Che would have put it: the peace is already considered to be broken. Thomas Jefferson would have already declared ‘our’ independence of a cabal that has, in effect, already destroyed the ‘legitimate’ government of the United States.

Section 3. Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and other officials of the Bush administration have conspired to wage war upon the American people and have subsequently done so. Having broken the peace, the social contract, the government itself, is and continues to be illegitimate! I might remind that when King Charles I presumed to put himself above the parliament, he got his head chopped off for his efforts! What punishment then, by precedent, is due those, not even ‘royalty’, who have conspired under the cover of ‘government’ itself to perpetrate the crimes of mass murder upon an innocent and unsuspecting population? One day, there must be justice.

A recent related development: Bush confirms that he personally approved the US program of torture.

A Friday ABC interview confirms: Bush “approved” of the torture techniques ABC’s Wednesday story detailed. But ABC fails to mention even more severe torture techniques that were implemented by Don Rumsfeld and Stephen Cambone – did George W. Bush give Rumsfeld the authority to implement what became known as “Copper Green” ?

Did George Bush sign an NSC document authorizing sexual torture methods, then delegate to Rumsfeld authority to implement those sex-torture methods ?

That’s the real question, this new ABC story is only the prologue…

ABC news has developed a new component of the torture story almost in perfect sync with my Thursday post on torture which stressed that because Bush is head, as president, of the National Security Council, of course he would have known of the overall gist of the “NSC Principals” White House meetings on torture policy because, regardless of whether Bush sat in on all meetings or not, all major NSC decisions and policy formulations have go to Bush’s desk for final approval, his signature. Bush is, indeed the “decider”

Once again, ABC News has pushed the White House torture program scandal further along and once again the story is embedded in a false frame.

And, the techniques discussed by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Powell, Rice and Ashcroft were not the worst of the torture techniques in question. ABC’s story discussed on level of torture severity but there was another level expressed through a secret program implemented by Don Rumsfeld and his operative Stephen Cambone: “Copper Green”. That program resulted in, as After Downing Street details, child rape.

So here’s the REAL question ABC’s story fails to confront and which was raised almost four years ago in the New Yorker by Sy Hersh’s may 15, 2004 story “The Gray Zone” : Did George W. Bush delegate authority to Rumsfeld to implement a second, even more severe torture regime ?

Did George W. Bush delegate to Donald Rumsfeld the authority to implement psycho-sexual torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere ?

As Sy Hersh’s story described:

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the CIA. …